


If You Can Make It Here

by Dorian



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, Fix-It, Fluff, Future Fic, They All Move to NYC
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-21
Updated: 2017-12-08
Packaged: 2019-02-05 05:57:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12788502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dorian/pseuds/Dorian
Summary: A collection of moments from, you know, the stupid idea that after graduation they move to New York.Moment 1: They leave the party late, after two, because Betty was having fun and the people weren’t completely terrible even though it was thevinyl has better aural texturecrowd. The night sky has a faint reddish cast from the falling snow.Moment 2: Right as he’s opening his laptop the better part of an hour later than he should have started in on revising his final round of edits, his phone buzzes against the wooden desk.Still on for coffee? <3





	1. The Wrinkles of the Road (Winter)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [StarlightAfterAStorm](https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarlightAfterAStorm/gifts).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to my amazing betas, @mercuryfish, @village-skeptic & @bewarethesmirk <3

They leave the party late, after two, because Betty was having fun and the people weren’t completely terrible even though it was the _vinyl has better aural texture_ crowd. The night sky has a faint reddish cast from the falling snow. 

A perfect shimmering layer of white accumulates on the sidewalks, covering the rough patches of ice. 

“Can I hold your hand?” Betty asks as they turn onto Bowery. Her eyes are a little glassy but her words aren’t slurred.

“You are holding my hand,” Jughead points out, pressing his gloved fingers into her palm. He can’t lace their fingers together because of her strange-yet-practical combination mitten-gloves.

“Your other hand. Both your hands,” Betty clarifies. 

Based on ribbing from her roommates and a few “freshman experience” jokes from Veronica, he’s gathered that she has gotten drunk enough to make herself sick once or twice at on-campus parties she didn’t ask him to come to, but he’s never seen her with more than this bright edge of a buzz. 

Waiting at the corner of Mott and Spring, Betty steps up close, facing him, and grabs his other hand, too. She slides their joined hands into the big front pockets of her puffy blue coat. 

“Thanks for coming tonight, Jug.”

He shrugs. The light changes. 

Jughead pulls his hands free with a brief squeeze and holds her elbow as they navigate the uneven pathways at the corner where the snow shoveled off the sidewalks meets the snow shoved off the street. Their feet crunch down through the strata of fresh powder and snowy ice to hit that bedrock of frozen-solid sludge. 

The other street corner been trampled almost clear, so he lets go of her elbow and takes her hand again. 

The parked cars lining the far side of the street are reduced to a series of glistening lumps. Snowflakes catch in the fake fur on Betty’s hood. She swings their hands back and forth between them. Every now and again there is a tug as one of them skids or slips a little.

The 99-cent slice shop down the block is still open, lit up and fighting the good fight for the drunk, the sleepless and the late-night hungry. They pass a tiny triangular park that’s locked shut with its benches all draped with snow, still and peaceful like the sort of truth you bury deep down in your heart. 

Blasts of frozen wind roll up Lafayette, sending the snow sideways. Betty laughs because it’s just so fucking cold and turns her face into his shoulder as the wind shoves hard against their backs. 

Five more long blocks to her place, which’ll feel like ten, and then he’s got the walk up to the subway stop on 8th street until he’ll get anywhere warm. 

They stop for lights to change at the couple of streets that still have traffic this late. While they wait, his hands end up back inside her hands inside her coat pockets because she is goofy-tired-tipsy enough that doing this makes her happy. Her nose is pink and her red lipstick has worn off to a rose-colored stain.

Even with the weather, on any Friday night this close to campus a trickle of stragglers flow past, faces tucked down into scarves. An occasional noisy group clogs up the sidewalk in a flock of expensive outerwear.

The last couple of short blocks aren’t so bad since the east-west streets are sheltered from the worst of the buffeting wind. His train ride home should be less than half an hour without the crush of people shuffling off and on at each stop. Betty’s already got him hooked on another true crime podcast before he’d even caught up on the last one despite how long his commute to work can be on a bad train day. 

_Funnier,_ she’d texted him with a link. _Also more forensic._

He walks her up the snowy steps to the slightly inset entrance of her building, which looks fancy on the outside with its gold-plated numbers and carved details framing the double doors. But inside is just a narrow beige hall with cracked and flaking ceiling plaster, never-quite-clean stairs and the impersonal set of crammed together mailboxes he associates with the university-owned housing he’s seen here and at her friends’ places. 

Betty tugs the mitten-like sections back from her fingerless gloves and fishes out her keys. With one hand pressed against the door, she glances over her shoulder and says, “Come upstairs.” 

“Your roommates are just going to bang on the walls again.”

The walls aren’t thin, but the space is so small that there might as well only be one big room for all the privacy she’s got. They tried keeping quiet late at night in her bed just that one time.

She shakes her head. “Not like that. Just. Come up. We can watch a movie. With earbuds.”

“Betts, it’s almost three in the morning.”

She turns, leaving her keys dangling in the lock, tucks her chin down and looks up at him through those long, dark lashes. Her eyes look gray rather than green in the dim light from the old-fashioned lamps set on either side of the entrance.

“I’m not hearing a ‘no,’” Betty says, mock-serious. Her smile curls up around the corners with a mischief that he so rarely sees in her, not since she stopped being the bossy tomboy who would climb trees higher than anyone else and get her clothes almost as dirty as Archie’s. Before ballet lessons and Nancy Drew and the start of what he thinks of now as her long “pink period” a la Picasso. Before murder and blood in her palms and more pills than he knew about at the time.

Snow falls through the patches of yellow light all down the street. 

He leans his weight into her, pressing their layers of sweaters and coats together, and kisses her soft cold mouth, cupping her face and sweeping away the damp spots where snow has melted against her skin. 

He’s going to go upstairs with her. He came to New York for her. He just hopes she knows that he’d—

“Yeah, okay,” he whispers against her mouth, between kisses, and then says, “But I get to pick the movie.”

Betty smiles into the next kiss. Her gloved hands and warm, bare fingertips come up to touch his cheeks.

All around them the hushed city shimmers and glows like a huge shaken snow globe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Based on the prompt “Can I hold your hand?”


	2. Semiosis (Summer)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to bewarethesmirk for betaing! For tallulalusa :)

Most of the day has already slipped by in a blur of class, study, work and now _desperately finish assignment_ with hardly even time to inhale a street cart shawarma on the walk back to campus.

The library’s picturesque main reading room is packed. The reading lamps form glowing rows between the bent heads. Jughead tries the second and third floors before retreating into the stacks to check the scattered desks until at last he finds an empty seat.

Right as he’s opening his laptop the better part of an hour later than he should have started in on revising his final round of edits, his phone buzzes against the wooden desk.

_Still on for coffee? <3_

He glances at Betty’s text, then the patches of green strikethroughs and the right-hand column of comments that push up off the top of the screen, and thinks, _Fuck_. Because that’s almost another hour gone trekking downtown and back, _if_ he can push his way onto the first train that comes despite the hectic, early evening crush of bodies—forty-five minutes even if all he did was kiss her hello, grab a coffee to go and head back uptown.

He hasn’t seen her all week. His phone is full of good reasons why, swapped back and forth.

_Can’t stay over, Jug. Study group meeting moved to before first class._

_Running too late to make it._

_Hey, fell asleep :(_

Adding one more to the pile won’t make much difference: _Sorry, a deadline crept up. See you tomorrow?_

He stares at the unsent text and then down the long lines of books in their sturdy but ugly brown and blue bindings stamped with plain white lettering. Through the window at the far end of the row, lit-up grids of buildings retreat backwards in geometric planes.

The stacks are so quiet he can hear a muffled baseline leaking out from nearby headphones.

Betty will understand, just like he’d understand.

He re-reads: _Still on for coffee? <3_

The things is, he knows just how often Betty’s texts are littered with frowny faces and an eclectic range of emojis that sometimes his phone can’t even display so all he gets is a row of blank square boxes. But Betty hardly ever adds that old-school, constructed heart.

 _Fuck_ , he thinks again, and texts her, _I want to see you_. And then, _Got a deadline, though. Can I sit next to you, be a jerk and stare at my laptop the whole time?_

He’s packing up when his phone vibrates again.  _Lol sure._

Jughead retraces his steps and pushes back through one of library’s big doors, cuts across the square and onto the street. The evening's sticky humidity settles like a weight against his skin. He’s held up at the next corner waiting for the light to change as the flow and rush of New York beats around him in layers of half-hidden order and noisy chaos when she adds, _But make it up to me tomorrow night._

He imagines her head thrown back against his sheets, the shake in her voice, his fingers intertwined with hers as he uses their joined hands to pin her to the bed until all that her sharp and restless mind can think about is him.

Jughead sends back, _You know I will._

He gets one of those indecipherable square boxes and then, just as the light changes, her familiar reply of the winking emoji blowing him that tiny heart-shaped kiss. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Based on the prompt “They live in NYC and life has been so demanding that they can only manage to meet for a measly hour to get coffee together.”

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on tumblr at [@burberrycanary](http://clktr4ck.com/qcg8).


End file.
